About this role
Embedding directly with enterprise customers in Seoul, the Forward Deployed Engineer leads technical discovery, system architecture, proof-of-concept builds, and production go-lives for voice, messaging, AI, and wireless implementations. This role operates within a local Enterprise Sales Pod alongside a dedicated Enterprise AE, taking ownership of the entire technical lifecycle without relying on a larger engineering backup team. Day-to-day work involves deploying AI voice assistants, running open-weight LLMs, configuring model gateways like LiteLLM, wiring production observability, and navigating regional regulatory environments such as PIPA and data localization across South Korea and the broader SEA region.
Candidates applying for this position will thrive if they possess strong customer-facing engineering instincts, deep technical fluency across multiple programming languages, and the autonomy to make sound architectural judgments independently. The ideal practitioner combines practical software engineering experience with the ability to lead high-stakes technical conversations, translate ambiguous customer issues into root causes, and communicate fluently in both English and Korean.
What you will do
- Embed directly with enterprise customers to understand communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges firsthand.
- Build and deploy custom implementations including AI Voice Assistants, WebRTC, and Telnyx APIs for voice, messaging, and wireless.
- Run open-weight LLMs in customer environments through Telnyx Inference or deploy self-hosted stacks behind serving engines when required.
- Deploy and operate LiteLLM as a model gateway to handle unified routing, load balancing, retries, fallbacks, and virtual keys.
- Wire comprehensive production observability with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
- Design model routing strategies for real-time voice workloads to balance latency, cost, quality, and fallback behaviors.
- Lead technical discovery, POCs, pilots, and production launches from initial whiteboarding to final go-live.
- Translate complex integration issues into root causes and create clear technical documentation and runbooks for handoffs.
What you need
- Hold a computer science degree or possess equivalent practical experience building and shipping production software.
- Demonstrate at least 3 years of experience writing production code, handling on-call duties, and debugging distributed or customer-facing systems.
- Show proficiency in multiple programming languages such as Python, Node.js, TypeScript, or Go.
- Possess practical understanding of production AI failure modes including provider rate limits, streaming, token accounting, and concurrency issues.
- Display comfort deploying containerized services on Kubernetes with proper secrets management, configuration, and upgrades.
- Bring high-concurrency experience working with event streams, message queues, or Kafka at real scale.
- Communicate fluently in both English and Korean to run whiteboard sessions, live troubleshooting, and executive presentations.
- Be based in Seoul or willing to relocate for this hybrid role requiring travel across South Korea and the broader SEA region.
Nice to have
- Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems
- Building evaluation sets for a specific domain
- Hands-on production experience with an LLM gateway such as LiteLLM, Portkey, Kong AI Gateway, or an in-house OpenAI-compatible proxy
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote and office policy for this role?
This is a hybrid role based in Seoul, South Korea. It requires working on customer sites and traveling across South Korea and the broader SEA region.
What technologies and tools will I work with daily?
Daily work involves programming languages like Python, Node.js, TypeScript, and Go. You will also use Kubernetes, Kafka, LiteLLM, WebRTC, and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
What does the team structure look like for this position?
You will work within a local Enterprise Sales Pod alongside a dedicated Enterprise AE. The AE owns the commercial relationship and named accounts, while you own the technical discovery, architecture, POC, and production go-live.
What are the primary background requirements for applicants?
Applicants need a CS degree or equivalent experience, plus at least three years of building and shipping production software. Excellent written and verbal communication in both English and Korean is required to run customer-facing whiteboard sessions and troubleshooting.